Hang onto Your Ghosts

Hang onto Your Ghosts

Pale dust trails a late sixties dream-Cadillac.

Small town.  Sweet & sour squirrel stew,

sundown tangled in silvery clouds,

scarecrows with cracked broomstick legs:

a flickering nightmare

in chapel-yellow candlelight.

Soft rain falls on a dusty road.

Ancient men hunch over cards.

Musty curtains.  Blue Linoleum floor.

One draws aces and eights.

Bottle of rye.

Don't worry.  It's them

short drives home

what kill people.

Summer.  Big night sky.

Bones of thought.

Moonlight in a ranchers's

crystal stem glass.

Oak-hard moodiness.

Painting of a ketchup-red horse.

French linen... ransacked heart.

Dream-rain, gust of wind

across a dozing hound

wedged between shadows.

A shuttered face twitches.

Vanilla-scented dream:

a quick-talking woman,

unkempt long ebony hair,

black currant lipstick.

 

 

 

The Situation Only Appears Familiar

The Situation Only Appears Familiar

Our scabland has fallen from the moon...

a meal some Revelations monster refused to eat.

Sitting at a window of a tumbledown

beef country hotel, you want something to happen,

Hitched to stumbling ways, the dying goes on...

with every call out of the alfalfa-green phone.

Carried forward:

an attachment for self-reprisals.

Gold sun, honey skin, kisses... love-groans.

You're only good, she giggled, for one thing.

You ran off too many sweet girls,

using Edvard Munch's notion

about paintings left in blizzards,

It does  them good to fend for themselves.

Vegas: hundreds of tequila bottles back.

The Great Plains?  Countless whiskey ditches ago.

HIGH PLAINS FANDANGO: A New Red Shuttleworth Play

High Plains Fandango

a new Red Shuttleworth play

Directed by Tom Loughlin

A World Premiere

at

State University New York - Fredonia

February 24-25-26, 

March 1-2-3,2012

High Plains Fandango, Red Shuttleworth's new play, opened on February 24, 2012, as part of the Walter Gloor Mainstage Series at State University of New York - Fredonia.  It was directed by Tom Loughlin at the Bartlett Theatre.

The cast was Kelsey Rispin as "Waitress," Clayton Howe as "O'Garr," Tony Taylor as "Ken Adams," Cassandra Giovine as "Cinthia," Claire Elise Walton as "DQ," Andrew Albigese as "Moss," Jessica Drew-Cates as "Aquinas," Nicholas Nieves as "Father Ben," Caitlin Molloy as "Isabelle Roche," Sean Marciniak as "Louis Roche," and Jonathan Dimaria as "John Hooley."

Clayton Howe ("O'Garr") and Cassandra Giovine ("Cinthia")

High Plains Fandango takes on the coming threat of water privatization in the face of national and international water shortages.  The American West, long subject to extraction economies, booms and busts, faces a not-so double-edged Bowie knife, progress (the beloved mantra boosterism and of the cancer cell) and full-bore despoilation.

High Plains Fandango received development and a public reading by the Echo Theater Company in Los Angeles.  The reading, directed by Ethan Phillips, was held at The Zephyr Theatre on March 14, 2011, with the following cast: Tara Karsian, Vaughn Armstrong, Gigi Bermingham, Wallace Bruce, Alana Dietze, Christopher Shaw, Anabella Price, Steve Hofvendahl, Paul Lieber, Rena Strober, and Rod McLachlan.  Red Shuttleworth is grateful to the Echo Theater Company!  Special thanks to Ethan Phillips!

Red Shuttleworth

High Plains Fandango is available as a paperback book (issued by Humanitas Media Publishing in 2015) and can be located on Amazon:

Red Shuttleworth's plays have been presented widely, including at Churchill Arts Council (Fallon, NV), Foothill Theatre (Nevada City, CA), Kearney State University, Spirit of the Horse Theatre (St. Paul, MN), Sundance Playwrights Lab, Sun Valley Festival of New Western Drama, and the Tony Award-winning Utah Shakespearean Festival.

I Met Someone Who Knows You

I Met Someone Who Knows You

Four days of driving.  Just to be gone.

Rockabilly road signs with bullet holes.

Or: a fifties movie about a gunfighter with a tired voice.

Price on his head.  Clouds.  Blood.  Dead trees.

Small town south of I-90: platinum-blond waitress in pink jeans

says, I met someone who knows you.

Yeah... and barb wire headlights.

Blood-eyed TV preacher can't admit it's all distant

thunder and goodbyes.  Spike-haired barmaid wants to know

right away if you'll sleep with her.  Can of Copenhagen to go.

Starbuck... Dodge... Dusty... Lacrosse...Hooper... Starbuck:

a Snake River loop.  Flesh-eating black & white cattle,

swaying dehydrated roadside coyote, distant thick-white smoke.

Dry heat 100.  Yellow potato chip sunrise.  The evening sun screams:

thick fields of green corn for gas tanks... a world of starvation.

  

Aren't You Forgetting Something?

Aren't You Forgetting Something?

The belly of the photo album has gone bad,

sepia-washing a 1962 rhododendron dell.

Why, little darlin' asked, do you declare envy

for any man who owns dozens of fenced goats?

It was a thin, wind-blown year in that country of ceramic

blue flowers encircling ancient tombs.  Others' dreams are boring.

Whirling dust and row upon row of unmarked pioneer graves

no one could see.  The docent said, You might check back later.

The artist wore a man's XXL T-shirt, made little crack-up giggles

as she glued together sheets of wind-blown cardboard she had collected.

She also had a trove of tin cans and medicine bottles from ghost towns.

She was making glitter-red cardboard apples, ... so delicious, no?

The fever and its twin fell upon me.  Our room faced clanging flag poles

at the front of the motel.  To be tranquil is to be dead... price tag on a toe.

The sparsely stocked Rite Aid store was out of photo albums.

The artist with the baggy T-shirt petted herself, scared the clerk.

If we had caught a train home, a pasta-eating couple from Des Moines

would've been seated at our table, would've gassed-on about Jesus' love.



Happy Birthday, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Happy Birthday, Alain Robbe-Grillet

( August 18, 1922 - February 18, 2008)

The girl crept into the bright water.

She had not eaten in two weeks.

Her skin was reddish, as if from slaps.

The witnesses contradicted each other.

Oh, no, Clarice had curly brown hair...

and she skipped into the water with a giggle.

The old woman from the old hotel surrounded

by half-dead pines went to the police,

She was no Clarice.  Hannah had short-croppped

blonde hair and then, when it grew out....

There was a man with Hannah, a fancy one

who walked as if from a lion's crouch.

The police collected as much surveillance tape

as they could from the resort and village shops.

The girl was asleep, bare-breasted... or already dead.

Some tapes showed she had been dragged

from the boardwalk, positioned on her back.

Not eaten in weeks?  The resort manager hopped

from one foot to another, I fed Daphne myself.

Sweet 'n' sour rabbit, buttery English muffins.

A girl caught sleeping in another's BMW

was hauled in for questioning.  She was asked

to remove her bikini top... for indentification purposes.

She said it was her sister who was counted

as missing, But I think she caught a bus home.

Some say we appear as identical twins,

but I'm two years older than she is.

The alleged sister was hard-questioned

about possessing razor blades.

When the tapes were shown to the sister,

she claimed that she was the performer

in at least half of them... the ones nearest

the lake.  The police chief clipped his fingernails,

smiled, asked the girl to repeat her account.

 

Poet Kirk Robertson

Red Shuttleworth and Kirk Robertson

Fallon, Nevada

July 1999

Kirk Roberston ( poet, artist, editor) published twenty-two poetry collections.  An arts legend, Robertson is a spare, tight, lyric bard of the fecund minimum.  William Kittredge said, What we should want is more artists like Kirk Robertson who keep poking holes in the facades we put up between ourselves and the emotional possibilities inherent in our lives and the lives of our communities.

Kirk Robertson has been inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. 

I knew and appreciated Kirk Robertson, both as a poet and as a friend, for decades.  We had a few drinks along the way.  And probably no one, at least no one I know, can speak about music with as much erudition as Robertson.

Just Past Labor Day by Kirk Robertson

What a wonderful collection of poems: Just Past Labor Day.  Get it if you can.  At least have your library order it through inter-library loan.  Or see if you can order it online from someone... new (yes!) or used; you'll thank me.  The dastardly director of University of Nevada Press allowed this treasure of vital, important, great writing to go out of print. 

Kirk Robertson

Fallon, Nevada

July 1999



And Kirk Robertson's New Poetry Collection,
How the Light Gets In:
New and Collected Poems 1969-2014,
published in July of 2014,
is available from Black Rock Press
at the University of Nevada at Reno!!!

While We're Waiting

While We're Waiting

Tell me, he said, phoning from prison, what's not up for grabs?

During the intermission of a lecture on the Dust Bowl,

the audience was treated to rasberry-flavored protein smoothies.

Who wrapped bacon on the rungs of the social ladder?

By some estimates, there are no fewer than a thousand

rickety-boned, frequently raped, American backpackers

currently in the jails and madhouses of Thailand.

Tonight's wind is blowing the sound of barking coyotes

to neighbor's... a mile south... and I am unreasonably jealous.

A boxer I met at a run-down gym when I was a boy

foamed at the armpits from bar soap used in place of deoderant.

Are we now too old to hike the 40 Mile Desert?

Am I a Hollywood Insider because I know that the girl

playing the guitar, pretty half-smile, in that HBO movie

keeps sleek with a diet of carrots and boiled broccoli?

Please, kids, do not dance atop the goddamned dishwasher.

The priest yelped, The devil carries a black clipboard...

and he's cheering for you, for all your pleaure-taking.

How much of my desire for her was related to her

sweaty, post-jogging, skin tasting like lemon meringue pie?

Since I had never seen one, my Hollywood friend

drove me to a studio apartment in The Valley.

The residents wore sandals, kept an enormous TV on mute,

spoke of bleached hair, boob jobs they admired.

There was a small backyard, blown-over plastic garden chairs.

Once upon a time I soaked my fists in salt water.

There certainly were a slew of guys worth sucker-punching.

Yes, I am wary of chubby women sporting

sterling silver kitty-cat brooches on sweaters.

At least more wary of them than their half-bald,

pot-bellied husbands... walking sacks of canned TV laughter.

Syrian raincoat: kevlar bulletproof vest.  In short supply.

The barista in Burbank, noticing who I was with,

asked if I was who she thought I might be.

I am a displaced northern Nevada alkali lake... 

set to make a comeback.



Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle

in her San Francisco home on Frederick Street

(in the 1970's)

Kay Boyle (February 19, 1902 - December 27, 1992) was a distinguished American writer who published nearly fifty books (novels, collections of short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction).  A ferociously independant woman and writer, Boyle, as Leah Garchik noted, was "always quick to approve or disapprove."  Boyle was in Paris with James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Robert McAlmon, and a raft of other writers.

A good place to start with Kay Boyle is Fifty Stories (Doubleday, 1980) and/or Collected Poems of Kay Boyle (Copper Canyon Press, 1991).  

For nearly two decades, Kay Boyle taught at San Francisco State University.  The most fortunate student writers had her for "directed writing," which she taught in her home on Frederick Street.  I was among the lucky, though I have no idea, to this day, why she chose to help me with my poetry, because she had made it clear, just before I became her student, that "white male writers have nothing more to say."  When I finally asked about this view, she smiled, "I wasn't speaking of you."

The first semester that I studied with her, once a week meetings, she spent the first nine weeks lecturing on Paris, praising those she liked, damning those she found distasteful or boorish or just talentless.  On our first meeting she asked what I drank.  "Irish whiskey," I said.  I settled for bourbon.  She drank what she always drank, Dubonnet.  After that Kay kept a bottle of Power's Irish Whiskey for me.  I'd get half-sloshed and she would lecture on the evils of drink for writers.  On the other hand, when Kay got going on why writers must not get flabby, must always be lean, that obese writers were awful, she praised my athletic appearance... saying that it signaled a marvelous writing future.

Although she widened my circle of influences, her writing was far from the turf where I could work.  It's probably natural for student writers to be strongly influenced by mentors... to consciously or unconsciously imitate them.  I had not the talent or sensibility for that.

Ever generous to her students, Kay located opportunities for them.  One afternoon she announced that it was time for us to do a joint poetry reading.  I was astonished... having carried the notion that Kay was, essentially, tolerating my rather soft and weak poems.  But read together we did, along with William Dickey (my other mentor), Jim Hubert (also a grad student... with a poem in Esquire, Barbara Riddick, and Gene Ruggles.  We had a marvelous night, with an overflow audience, at the Parkside Public Library in San Francisco.

If  not for Kay Boyle and her tiny camera, no photographs would have been taken at my oldest daughter's baptism.  Kay insisted, too, on being the first person to give us a gift for the forthcoming infant (a blue baby rattle) and, if memory serves, gave Kate and me diapers, baby powder, and many stern lectures on child-raising.

* I snapped these photographs (in the 1970's) as Kay talked to my wife, Kate.  The negatives were rediscovered recently... found in a box in a closet as I searched for old poetry notebooks.

The Poet Dave Kelly and Red Shuttleworth

Red Shuttleworth and Dave Kelly

Lake Michigan, 1976

Few poets blasted into the seventies with the firepower of Dave Kelly.  His Instructions for Viewing a Solar Eclipse (Wesleyan University Press, 1972), a dark-dark-dark sardonic take on the world, was much too bleak for critics.  But young writers loved Kelly's poems for their keen, dead-on, tough, beautifully wrought portraits of an America leaving the road at ninety, totally out of control.

The cover of Dave Kelly's Instructions for Viewing a Solar Eclipse

Kelly's book had just arrived in book stores.  The night I bought it I stayed up all night... reading it over and over.  A bright new poetry star had appeared in the heavens.  After I wrote a fan letter to Kelly, we began corresponding.  We became friends.  Kelly (and his Michigan State friends and classmates Jim Harrison and Gary Gildner) became a strong poetic influence.

Dave Kelly has not had a commercial or university press book since the appearance of Instructions for Viewing a Solar Eclipse.  His work no longer appeared in the poetry establishment's prominent journals, like Prairie Schooner, Atlantic Monthly and The Nation.  Kelly became a renegade poet of the small press scene.  His poems --bullets and jagged glass-- were not for reading at family Thanksgiving feasts, not if you wanted your mother-in-law to remain civil.

Dave Kelly is the most neglected poet in America... a great poet left out on the least hospitable edge of the frontier, a grim contrarian.

Dave Kelly... 1976

Books and chapbooks by Dave Kelly include:

Dear Nate  (Runcible Spoon, 1969)

Instructions for Viewing a Solar Eclipse  (Wesleyan University Press, 1972)

At a Time  (The Basilisk Press, 1972)

Did You Know They'e Beheading Bill Johnson Today?  (The Stone Press, 1974)

In These Rooms  (The Red Hill Press, 1976)

The Flesh-Eating Horse and Other Sagas  (Bartholomew's Cobble, 1976)

Poems in Season  (Texas Portfolio Press, 1977)

Filming Assassinations  (Ithaca House, 1979)

Northern Letter  (Nebraska Review Chapbooks, 1980)

Great Lakes Cycle  (Steps Inside, 1980)

Talking to Myself  (State Street Press, 1994)

When You Tell Them About Us  (Igneus Press, 2003) 



Dave and Sylvia Kelly

Lake Michigan, 1976

Emergency Room Check-In, Check-Out, Go Back In

Red Shuttleworth

1974 or 1976

Emergency Room Check-In, Check-Out, Go Back In

Someone's wife in a make-up mask, raccoon-eyed.

She uses a kerchief to wipe fried chicken grease

off her lips and hands, Fence posts  just rolled

lanky off the truck in front of us, ya know.

          ***

Alley rats and a burning high desert wind:

Arnold sleeps beside a blue-eyed cow dog

in a cardboard refrigerator box behind the Sears store.

Desolation-slime of the lungs... people should

brush their teeth before leaving behind

half-drunk soda pop cans 'n'bottles.

Their kids in rags, but they got money

for super sizing and salt-rimmed booze.

          ***

Sister's wedding was as much fun,

a ritzy-blue urn full of human ashes

out a car window at drunk-sixty.

He was using two waiting room chairs,

one for his butt, one for the foot

he'd dropped a twenty pound barbell on.

          ***

At the no-silence-ever tavern across the street

from the hospital, some cops were playing

pool for short stacks of dimes and quarters,

hot for the barmaid in the skinny white dress,

For what... to discover Kleenex in her

Victoria's Secret push-up bra?

          ***

As I walked down the streets of Ephrata....

Curt fractured his thinker cave years back

in a wreck with a green-broke horse.

Tonight he's playing a toy drum

with a couple of toothbrushes.

He's a regular: Got spiders in my socks.

Black widows.  Brown recluses.

Need some tweezers.  Need tweezers real quick.



Heavyweight Challenger Ron Lyle in 1975

Ron Lyle, within days of fighting Muhammad Ali

for the Heavyweight Championship of the World

(May 1975, Las Vegas, Nevada)

Ron Lyle, Don King, and Muhammad Ali

(one of the press conferences...

the Tropicana Casino in Las Vegas, May 1975)

Ron Lyle in the locker room of the Las Vegas Convention Center

after losing his bout with Muhammad Ali

for the Heavyweight Championship of the World

Ahead on all three judges scorecards in the 11th round, Lyle took a strong, quick right from Ali, then a number of unanswered punches.  The referee stopped the fight... in what soon became a controversial decision.  Lyle was stunned that the fight was ended despite his being uninjured and fully conscious. 

Ron Lyle fought professionally 51 times, winning 43 of those bouts. 

In the three weeks leading up to the Ali-Lyle fight, I was in Las Vegas, trying to break into freelance boxing journalism.  I managed to place articles and photo's with The Ring and Boxing Illustrated. 

Every morning, until 72-hours from the fight, Ali and Lyle did their roadwork,

rising early for dawn runs on the golf course of the Dunes in Las Vegas.

I ran those pre-fight miles with Lyle and his sparring partners.

I snapped all the photographs presented here.



Muhammad Ali in 1975

Muhammad Ali at the Tropicana Casino

Las Vegas, Nevada, May, 1975

Shortly after regaining the Heavyweight Championship in a brutal bout with George Foreman in Zaire (the Rumble in the Jungle), Muhammad Ali fought Ron Lyle on May 16, 1975 in Las Vegas.  Ali, behind on all three judges' scorecards in the 11th round, stunned Lyle with a right, then threw numerous unanswered punches... and the referee --in a somewhat controversial move-- ended the fight in Ali's favor.



During the three-weeks leading up to the Ali-Lyle bout for the Heavyweight Championship, I was in Las Vegas... struggling to break in as a freelance writer on boxing.  Both The Ring and Boxing Illustrated published pieces of mine from that fight.

Muhammad Ali and Angelo Dundee (Ali's trainer)

at one of the press conferences

leading up to the Ali-Lyle 1975 fight.

These three photographs were taken by Red Shuttleworth.